DDR4 You Can Use Now

After seven years of development, JEDEC released the DDR4 DRAM standard (JESD79-4) last fall. The standards committee recognized the ever-increasing performance demands placed on memory and knew that a simple update wouldn't be enough.

The DDR4 architecture represents a major departure from that of previous DRAM standards, affording significant performance improvement, dramatic reductions in power demand, and compatibility with 3D architectures. Typically, a couple of years elapses between the release of a standard and broad availability of product.

Given the rapid evolution of the technology, however, DDR4 is expected to mature quite a bit more rapidly than its predecessors, with broad deployment hitting in 2014. Indeed, at the recent Intel Developers Forum (IDF), companies demonstrated working systems, like Kingston Technology's memory demo highlighting 192 GB of working 2133 MT/s DDR4 Registered DIMMs at 1.2V operating on a future Intel reference platform. We thought it was a good time to take a look at some of the offerings out on the market available to design engineers.

The following slideshow reveals that the products curently sampling go beyond memory modules to include controllers and chipsets.

True...as you have mentioned, there are many applications where the power requirement is restricted and speed comes much below the low power requirement on the priority list; Where even SDRAMs could be preferred over DDR2/3.

I too guess that the memory manufacturing companies are not going to discontinue DDR2/3 soon, but due to lower volume, these chips might not get continued beyond 2015-16 time frame? Industrial systems ideally need to have a much longer service life compared to the phone, PCs; Hence I was thinking that the fast pace in the memory evolution is a challenge for the industrial product designers. What do you think?

I don't think DDR3/DDR2 will stop being manufactured, just that the manufacturers willl switch a larger portion of their factories to DDR4, just as what happened with the DDR2->DDR3 transition.

It makes sense for servers that want speed, and it also makes sense for phones and tablets that want power savings.

Now that 64 bit CPUs are starting to show up in phones and tablets, they can start putting more than 3Gig of DRAM in them. But this extra memory eats up power. A lower power and higher density DDR4 seems to fit the problem nicely.

The memory manufacturers could sell their slower parts to these markets for a lower price.

I guess I saw it was mentioned somewhere that DDR4 memories will have lot less power consumption compared to the DDR3 memories even though the frequency of operation is much higher compared to DDR3...how is that possible? Because of lower operating voltage?

Once DDR4 sales pick up, would DDR2/3 chips be made obsolete or those will co-exists?

I remember back when people were asking that question about DDR3 memory. Now DDR2 is a distant memory.

DDR4 will be more prevalent when CPUs that support DDR4 become more prevalent. Can a consumer even buy a PC (at Newegg, for example) that supports DDR4? I don't think AMD has any DDR4 CPUs yet. So, except for some servers, the cart is ahead of the horse.

DDR4 will be more prevalent when you can buy a PC at Newegg or Costco that supports it. And then you will see the rapid demise of DDR3.

And, like DDR3 when it first came out, at first DDR4 is much more expensive. When you can buy PCs that take DDR4, manufacturers will switch their production from DDR3 to DDR4 (Samsung has already started). Then DDR4 will be faster, lower power, and cheaper. This is why you'll see DDR3 disappear faster than you can blink.

DDR4 is capable of providing more the double frequency of operation as compared to DDR3 in use today. But the acceptance of the DDR4 production was very much slow, still it depends how much affordable it becomes to the consumers.

Interestingly some now say the DDR road map is not keeping pace and something new is needed. We will see stacked memory interfaces like HMC and WideIO come into production in the next year r so. Watch this space.